


Before the Night Grows Dark

by ennta



Category: Star Wars Legends: Young Jedi Knights Series - Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-16
Updated: 2015-04-16
Packaged: 2018-03-23 07:08:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3759058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ennta/pseuds/ennta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three Jaina/Zekk drabbles inspired by the poetry of Christina Rossetti.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. then if we lost our way

 

 

>   
>  _Let us get home before the night grows dark:_  
>  _For clouds may gather_  
>  _Though this is summer weather,_  
>  _Put out the lights and drench us through;_  
>  _Then if we lost our way what should we do?_  
>  _Goblin Market_  
>  Christina Rossetti

 

 

Life telescoped ten thousand fragile bones from soil to void, using stars as stairwells, and when she had tied the clouds of every sky together, she began to make her own stars and steer her own path. Ten thousand years removed from the grasping hands that built her sky, Jaina’s fragile bones still know that dirt is not a proper place to keep one’s feet, and so she guides them one by one up towards man-made suns that masquerade as buoys. Her stairs will always be well-lit; even when she stares into the spaces between the beacons, she will see nothing but an afterimage of the woman all her heroes are raising her to be. She will not see the black beneath the stairs, and if she does, she will turn away.

But when Life began to build upon herself, she had to leave some souls behind; souls to crouch and crawl in teeming earth, souls for other souls to stand upon until ten thousand shoulders rose beyond an atmosphere. Some say Life only makes so many stars so that she cannot see those she tasks to do a groundworm’s work. Ten thousand shoulders removed from Jaina, Zekk sees only the shadows, only an unlit corridor where he will become rags and rusted durocrete, the broken, dirty thing a city of lights is grinding him to be. 

And that is where he hears things that Jaina does not – 

( _hears_  because there is nothing by which to  _see_ ) –

Beautiful, beautiful promises whispered thick and sonorous, tangled languorous and lustful underneath the city streets; promises of strength drawn from dust and hatred, from a short lifetime of never-enoughs and nowheres. They echo down canyons carved as corridors for progress, abandoned to the darkness when another stair was built. Zekk feels them in his hands, curls his fingers around the meaningless words, lets himself drown in currents of energy that burn his skin but never light his way. These whispers offer a satiety he cannot turn away from, one that nullifies his aching, swallows all his desperate grieving.

Jaina would never so much as listen. 

And if she did, she would not understand the whispers, not like Zekk does; she would never set her boots against bloodstains and follow them until she held the murder weapon between her own slim fingers. No, she might follow him, might watch the blood drip from his knife with horror in her eyes, but she would bring a light behind her, and she would try to stop the bleeding.

Builder and backbone, backbone and builder; set against one another, they only come to realize that she is a product of his labor and he the fruit of her engineering. Life tries to justify the whispers and the undercurrents in his tired spirit as necessary evils, but Jaina places her hands over Zekk’s ears and kisses his eyelids until they open to the lights she has been climbing to. She leads him stair by stair, ten thousand years of yesterdays falling from their shoulders as they ascend, telescoping one another to a far-off sky.

 

*


	2. like spring-life born to die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A childhood, stolen by the weight of a weapon in a small palm.

 

_There is no time like Spring,  
Like Spring that passes by:  
There is no life like Spring-life born to die—  
__Spring_  
Christina Rosetti  
  
  
  
And suddenly as Jaina watched her feet swing over the side of the temple roof, as she listened to a rhythm soldered out of her boot heels on stone and Zekk’s soft breathing, she realized that a boy and a girl who wield fire and gravity and myth are not a normal boy and girl at all. She brushed loose pebbles and dirt from her hands, turned her palms up to face her eyes, and noticed, a little sadly, that gripping weapons just a bit too tightly leaves bruises.  
  
She surprised herself when her hands reached over to his face, when they slid excitedly over his cheekbones in a giddy rush to pull his mouth to hers, when they finally twisted themselves into his black hair to keep him close. She surprised herself by kissing him, because what does a young girl who has seen death—who has caused death, and will cause more, and whose own death will eventually be caused by another like herself—know about love?   
  
She knew enough, she supposed, to forget the weight of weapons, if only for a moment, as her hands memorized the warmth of his skin; she knew enough to catch the shock and tentative longing in his eyes and parted lips when they pulled apart, knew it mirrored the look on her own face. She knew enough to be a child at a crossroads, a woman at the same, far too young to be this old, and realized, a little sadly, that she belonged to a world where holding anyone too tightly would only leave bruises.

*


	3. o thou, heart-broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zekk watches his planet die.

 

_Yet saith an angel: “Wait, for thou shalt prove  
True best is last, true life is born of death,  
O thou, heart-broken for a little love.  
_ _L.E.L._  
Christina Rossetti  
  
  
  
A child watches a planet die. He doesn’t wait around for its resurrection. Only the little things come back to life—the sweet grass and tall flowers, the fireflies and the ants. Mums and Dads and loving arms are harder to replace. But he’ll try.   
  
Oh, he’ll try.  
  
*  
  
He finds a father in a grizzled spacer with a wide smile and replacements of his own to make.  
  
“I always wondered,” the spacer says, “what any son of mine would’ve looked like, if I’d had a son of my own. I wondered if he’d have blue eyes—or maybe brown, like Kera’s—and if maybe lookin’ at him you’d know my hair used to be blond.” His eyes shine. “You believe that?”  
  
“You’re delusional, old man,” the child scoffs, a twisted little smile at the corners of his thin lips. “You’ve been a hundred years old plus a day since the gods invented the galaxy.”   
  
So the spacer plays father and the child plays son, and what they play at is something neither one quite understands; a puzzle, a prayer, something stolen and only regained as a reflection off a broken mirror.   
  
*  
  
The child is weary of cages. His friends come from a world of golden palaces, but sometimes they descend to peer through the bars and whisper at him in secretive, excited tones. He knows for a fact that they only go to zoos to feed the animals and dodge the caretakers’ dirty looks.  
  
“Well, I don’t know about  _you_ ,” his very best friend says to her brother, “but  _I_  plan on putting a stop to the whole thing once I’ve finished my training. I’ll free all the slaves in the Outer Rim one day.”  
  
The child wonders if his friend’s grand quests will replace him as her primary source of adventure. He hopes that, as part of her heroics, she’ll come back and free him.  
  
Somehow, he very much doubts it.  
  
*  
  
He’s a young man before anyone truly believes in him, and then he meets a teacher with wise, sympathetic eyes and a father’s words.  
  
“You are worth so much more than they could ever imagine,” his teacher says, intense with the quiet strength of a man with something to prove. “Your friends speak against me because they want to keep you in a cage, to take you out and play with you when they’re bored. But they always put you back, don’t they?”  
  
The young man thinks awhile on friends and families and proof. In the end, he only ever proves himself a fool, and only ever learns that teachers— _fathers_ —can be demons, and friends can be forgiven.  
  
*  
  
He finds love in the woman who watched him through his cage, the woman who let him out and gave him the key to wear on a cord around his neck. For what seems only a moment in hindsight, she loves him, too, with an innocence he finds himself in awe of.   
  
But then there is war, and there is chaos, and the man is a child again, watching planets die, watching friends die, watching love die, and it hits again, cold and sharp, that he cannot bring any of it back. Only the sweet grass and tall flowers, the fireflies and the ants, will return; simple things that know nothing of life and death, only of the present and the momentary skies they linger under.  
  
Once upon a time, a child watched a planet die.  
  
For the rest of his life, he dreamed of resurrection.   
  
*

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LiveJournal, August 2009. Visit me on tumblr at [in-static-pallor](http://in-static-pallor.tumblr.com/).


End file.
